Carey M. Ballard
Part-Time Instructor
Carey M. Ballard is a part-time faculty member at Boston University Wheelock College of Education & Human Development, where he teaches in the Deaf Education teacher preparation program. His professional interests center on American Sign Language development, bilingual education, and improving educational outcomes for K-12 Deaf students.
Ballard’s experience includes academic research and teaching. He has contributed to multiple NSF and NIH funded projects focused on sign language linguistics, language acquisition, and sign recognition, and he has coauthored several publications on these topics. Ballard also has firsthand experience working with K 12 Deaf students. He taught in general education elementary classrooms in the New York City public school system, where he created bilingual ASL and English instructional materials and assessments specifically designed for Deaf learners.
In addition to his academic work, he is the lead filmmaker of the documentary Unmasking Deaf Education, which examines historical and contemporary issues in Deaf education.
Education
EdM, Deaf Education, Boston University
BA, American Sign Language, Gallaudet University
Selected Publications
Neidle, C., Opoku, A., Ballard, C., Zhou, Y., He, X., Dimitriadis, G., & Metaxas, D. (2024). New capability to look up an ASL sign from a video example. arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.13571. Retrieved from https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.13571
Rubio-Fernandez, P., Wienholz, A., Ballard, C. M., Kirby, S., & Lieberman, A. M. (2022). Adjective position and referential efficiency in American Sign Language: Effects of adjective semantics, sign type and age of sign exposure. Journal of Memory and Language, 126, 104348. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2022.104348
Neidle, C., Opoku, A., Ballard, C.M., & Dafnis, K. Chroni, E., & Metaxas, D. (2022). Resources for Computer-Based Sign Recognition from Video, and the Criticality of Consistency of Gloss Labeling across Multiple Large ASL Video Corpora. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'22).
Ballard, C.M. (2019). Carl Croneberg: Unsung Hero. Sign Language Studies 20(1), 173- 176. doi:10.1353/sls.2019.0017.